Amazon SES Now Supports Email Headers in Notifications

Posted on: Jun 14, 2016

Amazon SES can now include the original email headers in the bounce, complaint, and delivery notifications it provides through Amazon SNS. This feature enables you to more easily match a notification to the specific email that triggered it, because the notification can contain the email headers that you used when you passed the email to Amazon SES. Previously, when you wanted to match a notification to a specific sent email, you needed to store a mapping between the email and the message ID that Amazon SES returned when you sent the message. Now, you can add a custom header to the email and then retrieve that custom header from the notification, without storing the message ID on your side. You can include any other custom headers that might be useful to you. For example, resellers can now add client identifiers for improved tracking.

To enable this feature, you use the Amazon SES console or API to configure the feedback notification settings for an identity (email address or domain) and notification type (bounce, complaint, or delivery). Once this feature is enabled, the notifications will contain the headers in both raw name/value format and in JSON format for commonly provided headers. There is no limit on the number of headers the notifications can contain as long as the total size of the headers does not exceed 10 KB. If the total header size is larger than 10 KB, the notifications include the first 10 KB and indicate to you that the headers were truncated by using a field within the notification.

To see how the email headers are represented in the notifications, go to the Amazon SES Developer Guide. For general information about Amazon SES, see the detail page